Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Pop goes the WikiLeak: First Lady Gaga, now M.I.A., who's next?

Just few weeks after M.I.A. used Twitter to weigh in on the WikiLeaks controversy ....

"it suxx that wiki leaks have to hand over their docx 2 news outlets 2 break the news to the world, it doesnt make sense...."

"since their way of reporting doesnt work, and lets mindless government officials get away with murder"

.... the alternative hip-hop phenom has engineered a leak of her own. Fans have been ringing in the new year with “Vicki Leekx,” a free mixtape which you can download by clicking on the following handy widget:

The 36-minute recording opens with a heavily-accented recitation of a Julian Assange interview excerpt:

“We choose the right formatWe leak the information to the publicAnd we defend ourselves against inevitable legal and political attacks”

After that, it’s on to a continuous mix of M.I.A. tracks produced by dubstep-inclined luminaries like Rusko, Diplo, Switch, and the artist herself.

M.I.A. isn’t the first dance-pop diva to get her name tied to the whistle-blowing organization that specializes in making classified information public. According to Reuters news service, Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning, who was arrested last May and has since been held in solitary confinement, used Lady Gaga recordings as an integral part of his covert operation:

“Manning said he listened to the flamboyantly-dressed singer’s “Telephone” as he pulled the documents off a military server in Baghdad, according to a transcript of online chats Manning had with a former hacker, Adrian Lamo. The chats, which occurred earlier this year, were posted by Wired.com on June 10. Lamo confirmed details of the chats to Reuters.

“’I would come in with music on a CD-RW labeled with something like ‘Lady Gaga’ … erase the music … then write a compressed split file … no-one suspected a thing. listened and lip-synched to Lady Gaga’s Telephone while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in american history,’ Manning wrote in the uncapitalized, lightly punctuated style of a webchat.”